THANKSGIVUKKAH: IT WAS ABOUT TURKEY, LATKES AND TIME

Long strings of numbers seem to hint at the romance of a universe he’s figuring out at warp speed. Though only 5, Austin’s champing at the bit of infinity.

This year, thanks to the harmonic convergence of Thanksgiving and the first day of Hanukkah, I stole a few minutes to review with Austin how many years it will be until this fluke of the Gregorian and Jewish calendars is repeated.

My quiz, which he aced in seconds:

If, as someone very smart has estimated, the next time Thanksgivukkah happens again will be 79,811 years from today, how old will you be when that day is celebrated?

Austin’s answer: 79,816!

The existential problem implicit in that math question was left for a future no grandfather performing his last genetic job is in a hurry to reach.

“The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time,” Abraham Lincoln famously observed.

The best thing about Thanksgiving, when tribes great and small gather, is that it’s a day featuring fresh food naturally frozen in the frame of memory. In a culture inundated with rushing streams of Facebooked selfies, time slows down to ourselves.

For the duration of our family’s time on Earth, yesterday will be recalled as the hybrid Turkey Day when latkes served as dinner rolls, dreidels were spun among autumn leaves, pumpkin pie was cut for the grown-ups, home-baked Hanukkah cookies were doled out to Austin and 2-year-old Ainsley, who won praise for carefully removing the stems of spinach leaves for her mom’s stuffed squash.

On this day, the two candles of my wife’s menorah were lit in the living room, not the dining room, a separation of temple and state, if you will.

Einstein’s immortal reflection on time nicely dovetails with Lincoln’s: “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”

The segmenting, the stopping and savoring and storytelling, is a huge part of what it is to be human. It’s the mortal mind managing the runaway train of time.

Maybe that’s why I love so much the really big number that will for the next 79,811 years mark Thanksgiving 2013.